I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence for which music alone finds the word,
And the silence of the woods before the winds of spring begin,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities—
We cannot speak.
A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
“How did you lose your leg?”
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, “A bear bit it off.”
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.
There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of a deep peace of mind,
And the silence of an embittered friendship,
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
And the silence of the gods who understand each other without speech,
There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.
There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d’Arc
Saying amid the flames, “Blesséd Jesus”—
Revealing in two words all sorrow, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.
And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.
_Stephen Crane_
Stephen Crane, whose literary career was one of the most meteoric in
American letters, was born at Newark, New Jersey, November 1, 1871.
After taking a partial course at Lafayette College, he entered
journalism at sixteen and, until the time of his death, was a
reporter and writer of newspaper sketches. When he died, at the age
of thirty, he had ten printed volumes standing to his credit, two
more announced for publication, and two others which were appearing
serially.
Crane’s most famous novel, _The Red Badge of Courage_ (1895), was
written when he was twenty-two years old. What is even more
astonishing is the fact that this detailed description of blood and
battlefields was written by a civilian far from the scene of
conflict. This novel (Crane’s second) was an instantaneous and
international success. _The Atlantic Monthly_ pronounced it “great
enough to set a new fashion in literature”; H. G. Wells, speaking of
its influence in England, said Crane was “the first expression of
the opening mind or a new period ... a record of an intensity beyond
all precedent.”
Crane’s other books, although less powerful than _The Red Badge of
Courage_, are scarcely less vivid. _The Open Boat_ (1898) and _The
Monster_ (1899) are full of an intuitive wisdom and a sensitivity
that caused Wells to exclaim “The man who can call these ‘brilliant
fragments’ would reproach Rodin for not ‘completing’ his fragments.”
At various periods in Crane’s brief career, he experimented in
verse, seeking to find new effects in unrhymed lines, a new
acuteness of vision. The results were embodied in two volumes of
unusual poetry, _The Black Riders_ (1895) and _War Is Kind_ (1899),
lines that strangely anticipated the Imagists and the epigrammatic
free verse that followed fifteen years later.
Besides his many novels, short stories and poems, Crane was writing,
at the time of his death, descriptions of the world’s great battles
for _Lippincott’s Magazine_; his droll _Whilomville Stories_ for
boys were appearing in _Harper’s Monthly_ and he was beginning a
series of similar stories for girls. It is more than probable that
this feverish energy of production aggravated the illness that
caused Crane’s death. He reached his refuge in the Black Forest only
to die at the journey’s end, June 5, 1900.